Innovative finance is a way to drive equitable outcomes in education, says Hanna Jamal, director of Social Finance. The organization is an impact finance and advisory nonprofit that works with a variety of stakeholders to build partnerships with the goal of improving lives.
Social Finance is partnering with TheDream.US to develop an education financing initiative for immigrant youth who are unable to access federal loans for graduate school because of their immigration status.
“We’re specifically focusing on degree programs and institutions that are high quality and that we believe have really strong labor market outcomes. We don’t want to create a situation where we’re saddling a bunch of students with debt that they can’t repay,” says Jamal.
“We focus specifically on eligibility criteria and high labor market types of programs. So, think about your Master’s in nursing health sciences, medical degrees, MBAs, degree programs where we believe students can actually justify the debt that they’re taking on and be able to repay it back over time.”
Currently, the program is targeting scholarship recipients of TheDream.US—which has awarded over 6,500 scholarships to DACA students towards bachelor’s degrees.
Jamal says the interest in graduate school among that population is significant. “Their surveys indicate that 70% to 80% of those students have aspirations of continuing their education by going on to get their professional degrees.”
“Ideally, over time, we’ll be able to further expand the aperture and serve more dreamers that aren’t part of TheDream.US, but that’s where we’re starting. And with this pilot cohort that we’ve launched for this fall, we expect to make about 90 loans to students.”
The program has set a goal to expand the number of awarded loans to 1,000 students over the next five years.
Click here to learn more about Social Finance.
WorkingNation—a collaborating partner of the ASU+GSV Summit—sat down with Jamal in San Diego as part of our #WorkingNationOverheard social media series.
Hear from more innovators in education and tech in the public, private, and nonprofit spheres attending the ASU+GSV Summit 2021 here.
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Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.
Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.
Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.
Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.
Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.
Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.
